Build changes / snapshot versioning

[John Burbridge]

Hi Greg and folks,

I really liked the direction of the new build changes that were checked into the development branch, namely:

- switching the snapshot artifact generation to use the maven standard (as opposed to -dev)

- generation of javadoc and source jars

- using maven uploader for artifacts

- and applying the signing plugin 

I have a couple of comments / suggestions. A while ago I had posted a fork with a mostly gradle-driven build that combined all java build components into a single multi-build project, and wrapped the grails project with gradle tasks to manage generating the dependencies, installing them into the mavenLocal() repo and then defined the dependency in grails to pull in the correct version (snapshot or release). The advantage being that one could simply issue "gradle build" from the root project and let gradle decide what needed to be rebuilt, which significantly speeds things up for development. 

You can find the work I've done here:

https://github.com/johnburbridge/rundeck/tree/newbuild

One of the niftier bits is that I'm setting the version under the root gradle.properties, appending -SNAPSHOT based on a build-type property (dev vs release) and then automatically updating grails' application.properties with the correct version. Seems somewhat similar to what you're introducing, no?

Would it make sense to combine both efforts? 

The missing bits in my build were integrating package generation, docs and maven pom updates, though I'd be happy to work on those if we think this is the way to go.

Cheers,

JB

[Greg Schueler]

Hi John,

Yes, I like the direction you have gone.  I have not had much of a chance to look at it, I can hopefully do that this week.

It's fine if the docs and packaging have to be built separately via Makefile and are not part of the gradle/maven build. That would just affect our jenkins build script.

The existing root maven pom can already build the stack (sans docs/packaging and perhaps plugins), so as long as we have a simple way to keep the declared version #s in synch, that should be fine.  (If we can eliminate the "setversion.sh" script that would be a large plus, i.e. get that functionality in the gradle build).

If you think what you have is good enough for a merge, or close to it, can you submit it as a pull request?  We can track the finnicky details as comments there.

Thank you for your efforts!

Greg

[John Burbridge]

Sounds like a plan, pull request coming your way!